The Elements
by seriousblahblah
Summary: How do you build a great school like Hogwarts? By using the elements of course: Fire, Earth, Air and Water. Godric/Helena. Godric/Rowena. Salazar/Rowena. A dark tale of brilliant minds gone awry with love, greed and inescapable lust for knowledge. Complete.


**_[Written for Princessss who requested a Founders Fic and for SparkyShe-demon who made me love the Founders era]_**

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 **The Elements**

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How do you build a school?

By using the elements of course: water, fire, air, and earth.

These are the foundations, the Founders, of a great school.

This is how Hogwarts was founded, one element by one, a thousand years ago.

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First, there is Fire.

Godric is fire.

He is a proud, brave man; a knight with a lion's crest, a Crusader before even the crusades began. He has gone on many quests afar in the Near East and plains of Africa. Yet when he returns home to Briton, and its primeval ways, he sees something lacking, that he saw first in Greece and Rome: ancient and classical learning.

Like the fire of Prometheus, stolen from the gods, he wants to teach the sons and daughters of this land everything that will make them great, and build a great civilization.

Godric is the fire, that starts the dissemination of knowledge; he starts ordering a large number of books from the Far East.

He will build a new Alexandria here, he will build the greatest school on the continent.

He names it Hogwarts. Where the fire will forever burn in learning and the pursuit of knowledge.

He wants to open the doors and spread the fire of knowledge to as many pupils as possible.

Godric thinks, "The more light is spread, the farther it reaches."

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Helga is the earth. The bountiful, the feminine, the cornucopia from which he will build his school.

Her body, her mind, is the land on which he builds the rocks and mortars that will become the castle.

Her inheritance, her hand in marriage, is the leverage he uses to place each stone and pebble until a mighty fortress of learning and enlightenment stands out from the ground.

In a way, Helga gives birth to the school. She is his wife and midwife in creating Hogwarts and he loves her all the more for it, cherishes her.

And yet, when it is done, he forgets and neglects her, as all men of fire and greed forget the earth and take advantage.

Yet Helga Hufflepuff is the earth, she is the rocks and soil.

She is the cup from which all bounty flows.

For everything comes from and returns to earth, to soil and dust and silt.

She will see to it that no one is turned away or goes hungry or the door shut.

She is open arms and cornucopias; Helga is the earth.

 _(Her emblem is the badger; forgotten but true and holding close to the earth, this soil dweller. He digs holes but is never far away._  
 _At Hogwarts, he is at home.)_

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When one cup is filled, another will be found.

Godric becomes unfaithful to his first wife and he takes on a Mistress. And yet it is preordained, so Helga accepts her, once again, with open arms. (The Hufflepuff arms are always open.)

Her name is Rowena.

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Rowena is air. She is lightness and wind and changingness and everything Helga is not.

While Helga is unchanging and constant, both in her faith and presence; Rowena couldn't be more unreliable.

She is always chasing some tangent or new theory in her mind. Dressed in her blue robes and surrounded by ravens, she blows in and out of Godric's life like a wind and yet - like all fire and men of wrought iron - he wishes to possess her.

So Godric lures her in with books and sets a Golden Cage atop her.

Rowena is his bird. His possession. His wild, exotic thing he comes to look at and touch, everytime he admires his possessions and his castle.

He must have her.

Whereas Helga is always agreeable, Rowena alone defies him with her wit; and as a fire grows larger with wind, so Godric grows greater with Rowena.

She is his salve and honey and vinegar; both truth and damnation at once. Rowena will tell him where he goes wrong; and she will commend him and be the first to congratulate him when he does right.

She is the truth, rationality. She is the very knowledge he sought.

He makes love to her, and to her mind, like a dragon laying hold of something it craved for a very long time.

She is the roost, and Godric is coming home, to lay his eggs of ambition, to lay down his sword in her sheath.

Rowena is the stolen jewel of Hogwarts. Her stomach soon fills with his child.

She is befriended by Helga, who takes pity on the caged bird, for wind and air should never be stoppered.

Covered in jewels and filled with his fire, Rowena gives birth to a child; she names her Helena, after her friend Helga Hufflepuff.

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And then she lets her own child fall from the nest, and throws the diadem Godric gave her too.

She will never be his Mistress again.

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Salazar comes last.

Salazar is water.

He _appears_ to come at last. Water was always there at the beginning and at the end. It has long ties to the earth, where it soaks in underground caverns and builds lakes and streams of bubbling fresh water and snaking, long rivers.

Water even knows air, where it slowly builds clouds of condensation and infiltrates the minds of birds and deliberately leaves cages unlocked.

Salazar is water, he slithers and snakes his way into anything; even a drop of him can slip through a keyhole.

Godric calls him a snake, a watersnake, a _gunther_ , an infiltrator. Yet he is astounded by Salazar's strange powers of magic. His dark magic, he calls it. And so Salazar is welcomed with open arms into Hogwart's inner circle.

Salazar is like a magician even among wizards. He is full of tricks.

Like water, he transfigures things from steam to droplet to solid. Godric has never seen power like this.

The fire wants to be taught all that water knows.

They become like brothers. _(Fire and water.)_

Like brothers. _(Fire and water.)_

Until, one day, the fire sees water trickle in, like its drops, into Rowena's cage and animosity becomes hate.

But water is there at the end and there at the beginning, and like earth, it never really goes away.

Salazar vows revenge and he sinks underground into another Chamber where he will wait, patiently, as water does, to bubble up to the surface and rust through the bars and infiltrate the air and stamp out the fire.

For years, a dormant serpent lays in wait.

Water never really goes away.

It condenses and condenses a thousand-fold until it is ready to flood.

It _vows_ to flood, and it keeps the fire in check from spreading like a wildfire across the land and scorching the earth. Of pushing the cornucopia too far.

Each element balances the other.

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And the Foundations are stronger because they hold many secrets and all elements. For to build a great school: you need each of the elements and the elements are Fire, Earth, Air and Water.

This is how Hogwarts was founded, one element by one, a thousand years ago.

And if the water should ever flood, then the air will build up the fire again and the fire will recapture the earth until the water seeks to purge it again...

And this is how it goes.

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 _Author's note: Thanks for reading/following/_ faving _/reviewing, I have lots of other stories too on my profile but this is the only one of my stories that_ is _sort of half-way to being a poem. Although my James/Hermione story also sort of sounds like a poem at parts too...anyways merry_ christmas _, and peace on earth :)_

 _and thanks to_ princessss _,_ sparkyshedemon _and_ scrumptiousinternetllama _for getting me to write about the Founders_

 _Writing challenges: [Shipping War: Rowena/Godric vs Rowena/Salazar; Optional Prompts: (creature) dragon][Founders Prompts Challenge: (Word) Greed; (Pairing) Helga/Godric; (Word) Emblem;(Pairing) Godric/Rowena]_


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